The Slow Money Alliance, an organization that seeks to build networks and develop new financial products and services to invest in small food enterprises and local food systems, connecting investors to their local economies, and building the “nurture capital” industry, held its national gathering at beautiful Shelburne Farms, Vermont on Thursday and Friday of last week. While the rain and fog kept attendees under the tents for much of the first day, nearly 600 people came from all across the U.S. to talk about slow money and much more. Full disclosure requires me to reveal that I joined the Slow Money Alliance simply to receive a discount on the registration fee. And while the speakers lineup was impressive, my natural cynicism reigned supreme initially.
The agenda for the gathering was full and the list of invited speakers included Bill McKibben, farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, Chef Kurt Michael Friese a member of the Slow Food USA Board of Directors, Gary Hirshberg, CE-YO of Stonyfield Farm, BALLE Executive Director Michelle Long, and many more in the world of socially responsible finance, organic agriculture, writers, investors, nonprofit organization pioneers, filmmakers, and others. Organized by the Slow Money Alliance with Chairman Woody Tasch and his energetic and capable crew, this event started strong with a broadcast of NPR’s eTown from the Flynn Theatre in Burlington, VT, the gathering picked back up where it left off the following morning with a particularly memorable and powerful oration by Bill McKibben.
Leading off first thing in the morning while breakfast was winding down and the registration tent still populated, McKibben hit on his disappointment following Copenhagen and how the challenges before us are no less clear and present. Calling for the media to stop referring to the Gulf oil disaster as a “leak”, he cited it as just the most recent example of the culture of growth, which he boiled down to “building bigger houses farther apart from each other.” Simple as that. And what this project did to us human beings was the creation of a culture where we ran into each other less, we ate less meals with each other, and we have less friends than previous generations. All of this, he said, created a vulnerability and brittleness that makes us as a people less resilient in the face of our coming challenges. But what we need to be moving toward, according to McKibben, is a localized future where our problems can be kept from becoming disastrous–not super concentrated but distributed and diffuse, as the risk should be…..and we need to accelerate this shift to the local dramatically.
Much of what he spoke of is described eloquently and at length in his new book Eaarth, copies of which were made available to participants of the gathering. And the hope that McKibben hinted at in the book was on display during his speech on Thursday morning. He believes that humanity has stumbled down a short cul-de-sac of the growth economy and will find its way back to the main road and be back on the path toward sustainability and more interesting things. But he emphasized that in order to do this, we’ll have to staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly since any further atmospheric trends extended reduces the time and opportunity to simplify, re-localize, and slow the hell down. He summarized the challenge with some standard suggestions including a stiff price for fossil fuels and working at both the local and global scales for change including a greater focus on local government. In all, it was one of the more memorable and powerful McKibben speeches that I’ve heard but his book more or less sums up the narrative.
The program shifted to the discussion of socially conscious investing and its role in the slow money movement. Pioneer socially responsible investor Robert Zevin of Robert Brooke Zevin Associates as well as gathering organizer Woody Tasch expanded the time slot admirably due to the cancellation of Chris Martenson who many in the gathering came specifically to hear. No question that to have a progressive investor with the pedigree of Zevin was as much of a coup for this event as any speaker on the agenda. While Zevin was low key in his delivery, he emphasized that private, family, and co-operative businesses have better rates of return in the long run than public companies due to the need by public companies to show cyclical short-term returns on investment and the business decisions that this strategy forces. Zevin’s “sustainable growth” philosophy seems a reasonable and moderately progressive mantra for slow, gradual shift to a better world but the pregnant unasked question is whether this world has the time to nudge the cultural Titanic to a better, safer course. Having Martenson follow up with his perspective on investing in the stock market given the acute risks of his 3 e’s would have been interesting in contrast. Woody Tasch followed Zevin with a brief discussion of the vision of the Slow Money Alliance and its history and inspiration more of which can be found here.
After lunch on Thursday, Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin put his finger on a key problem facing small scale organic farm operations. Noting that while regulations aimed at large industrial scale agricultural operations make sense due to the problems such operations engendered, they have little applicability to the small farmer and do more harm that any good that might come from them. Clearly suggesting that such regulations were actually a huge competitive advantage for large operations in the corporate agricultural system, Salatin described how small farms had to ship animals for abattoir services many miles away and receive the shipments of processed meat back the same distance just to be able to market from the property. This is unquestionably a glaring example of how the regulatory system is stacked against the local grower and distributor and is as carbon unfriendly as possible. Salatin went through ten principles that the farm adheres to including not setting a sales target, no trademarks or patents, a clearly defined market boundary, an incentivized workforce, no IPO, no advertising, staying within the ecological carrying capacity, having people answer the phone, respecting the “pigness of the pig”, and that quality must always go up. Each principle makes an astonishingly obvious amount of sense and Salitin came off as a humorous gentleman Southern farmer who most would love to have sitting across from us at the dinner table spinning yarns and producing deep belly laughs along with knowing nods of the head. The takeaway message from Salatin was that regulations needed to be scalable in order for small operations to be viable and government at all levels needs to be cognizant of this.
The remainder of the Thursday sessions included a talk by Stonyfields’s Gary Hirschberg and a panel on Soils that included Will Raap of Gardener’s Supply, Tom Stearns of High Mowing Seeds, and Eliot Coleman of Four Seasons Farm. Notably, peak oil was clearly identified as a key challenge by several speakers on this first full day. Day two offered more from an investment perspective and began with short talks by Don Shaffer of RSF Social Finance and Terry Kellogg of 1% for the Planet followed by a 90 minute entrepreneur showcase of 25 enterprises each giving a three minute spiel including a plea for investment funds to continue their good works. Notably this array included The Farmers Diner, Mamma Chia Beverages, and 18 Rabbits snack foods (I would definitely recommend scrolling through these companies here should you have any interest in green investing). Continuing the line of impressive speakers to finish out Friday morning was Kurt Friese of Slow Food USA, Erica Allen of Growing Power, Alisa Gravitz of Green America, and Michelle Long of the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies (BALLE). The afternoon included breakout sessions on the Slow Money initiative, farmland preservation, and socially responsible and mission-related investing.
Overall impressions of this event required a patient wait while each session built upon the previous and interest and excitement grew with each presenter. Early on Thursday as the rain grew steadier and organizers had not yet hit their stride, the event seemed contrived and stiff. Questions around where the Slow Money initiative fit in with other movements such as BALLE and other local economy groups, the Transition movement and relocalization efforts, Slow Food, and other sustainability initiatives were on the minds of participants. However, as the momentum built and it was clear that the range of people attending this event included investors, farmers, writers and filmmakers, local government personnel, city planners, students, small progressive entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and activists, an emotional groundswell began to give the event some energy and excitement and early stiffness fell away as people shared meals together, broke off to hold engaging discussions on their shared interests, and traded contact information. Adding to the charismatic feeling of this event was the beautiful and enchanted setting of Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont with its rolling, fecund farmland, spectacular farm buildings with turrets and spires, and Lake Champlain shore front with the backdrop of the New York Adirondacks beyond the lake.
Admittedly a pessimist and cynic regarding rah-rah events such as this one and I had modest expectations regardless of the high powered agenda. Initially I remained skeptical that this gathering would be little different than many others that I’ve attended and left feeling no more hopeful or positive than before. Yet to give great credit to the organizers, the Slow Money Alliance, they put on a great program and whether by conscious social engineering or serendipity, I came away with an excitement for the future that I haven’t experienced in years. Granted that several elements of the threats that we face were not directly engaged by participants during these two days, such as the viability of our economic system and the acute challenges of peak oil, but it seemed unspoken that everybody in attendance “got it” and that we didn’t need to go over that ground in advance of discussing solutions. Besides, McKibben’s book was a good takeaway to refresh on those points. Hats off to the Slow Money Alliance for beginning to build some bridge abutments to a hopeful future.
